Whats wrong with stoicism. Feelings are fleeting in general didn't lead me to positive places. I think we should put a high value on people that can handle their own problems.
The way to overcome pain is to acknowledge and include it instead of denying it. The difference is huge, and most of us need help to get there—personally contactful help, not idea help. I found it pretty liberating to be able to get such help from other men, in a group no less. The point is not to become a gushy feeling-sharer or a sensitive new-age male. It is to no longer be governed by unconscious feelings and the wounds of early experience.
The organizations that practice this work are not super clear about that distinction, which I suspect limits their appeal to many men. I went because of a friend I respect, who in turn went because of a friend he respects. Had either of us only read an article like this, I doubt we'd have been interested. Its subtle ironizing, which approaches belittling ("chastened menfolk", "There, there"), would have turned me off. The photos would have turned me off too, and I've sat in a lot of workshops (though usually with few men and many women).
Edit: an interesting thing to me was the gap between practice and theory. Even though there were parts of the theory behind that work which I didn't necessarily find appealing, I met quite a few men there who struck me as having a kind of integrated masculinity (maybe not the best phrase, but it's hard to find words for these qualities). They seemed strong and open at the same time. I found myself admiring them and wanting to be more like that myself. None of this had much to do with expressing feelings or being emotional; I would use the word presence instead. They maybe even seemed a bit less emotional than most men I meet—more able to take in what is happening without being reactive.
So I would say the theory doesn't work as well as the practice. You barely ever get that! usually it's the other way around.
Publicly? It's one thing to be denial, it's another to acknowledge it to yourself but still elect not to engage in a public display of this. The strongest men I've ever met were not in denial of their emotional state but didn't need to engage in public displays like those listed in the article.
On the one hand yes, there's no need for emotional display for its own sake. As far as I've observed, that is mostly a cultural (or really a subcultural) marker anyhow; some communities value it, that's fine. I'm not personally that comfortable with emotion as a tap that gets turned on and off on demand. (During the group I mentioned above, I told them that if they kept asking me what I was feeling, the only feeling they were likely to get out of me was anger about being expected to feel something.)
That sort of cultural practice is a different thing, though—completely different—from deep feeling coming into experience as part of a healing process. The latter is not a tap and there is no quality of display about it. It is more like a flood that rises from forgotten places, and the healing comes from surrendering to that flood and allowing it to change whatever changes. Maybe after that you become more emotionally expressive, maybe not; I personally think that matters less than people in these communities say it does. But you become more integrated, gain capacity, become less reactive, less conflicted.
The subtle part comes up when you say "Publicly?". Yes and no. I don't think there's any need for ongoing public emotionality. I do think there's a deep reason why healing can't fully happen in isolation. It's because our wounds happen in relationship, usually in early relational experiences, and what is wounded relationally can only heal relationally. Personally I have found that frustrating—I would rather go off somewhere, resolve my issues myself, be a self-healing organism. But I've come to see how this impulse to isolation is actually an aspect of the wound itself, and so not a way to heal. Wounds don't heal themselves—they just repeat until something changes. As far as I can tell, there's no way to avoid connecting with others if you want that to change. But others' mileage may vary, and in any case this connecting needs to happen in safe, closed environments with strong containers, not in random public settings.
I think this is where meditation (and stoicism) deviates from some types of psychotherapy and most support groups. Meditation teaches you to look at feelings dispassionately, which helps you lessen their power. This is very different than treating each emotion as if it is "correct" and in need of resolution via lots of introspection.
Anxiety means your brain has more of a tendency to worry about potential threats. Possibly because your amygdala are more easily activated. It may just be that, back when we lived in the savannah, being easily aroused by potential threats, and being overly careful, was in many ways beneficial for survival. However, we live in a time of relative safety, and it seems that being someone who worries a lot about potential threats is not generally a useful trait.
I'm not saying that there's nothing you can do to manage anxiety, that is obviously false, but I'm saying there's a strong genetic component, and that judging people who appear more anxious and telling them just suck it up shows a fundamental lack of self-awareness and understanding of how the human brain works.
I have been this way my entire life and as far as I'm aware it didn't come about from some life experience, I think I was just born like this. My mother used to laugh that everything was "like water off a duck's back" to me.
All throughout school and University I never once was stressed about any piece of assessment or any exams. There were a few I was woefully unprepared for and knew I would likely fail, but it never really bothered me. It wasn't that I didn't care, I just never saw the point in worrying as worrying is never going to change anything.
My wife is the opposite. She stresses about everything, many things that are completely out of her control. I have learnt a lot about how to support someone in that frame of mind, even when I don't understand why they are stressed.
This does have downsides. Many people, especially in professional contexts, mistake my stress free and easygoing nature as laziness. I also have relatively low empathy, though I'm not sure if that's a side effect, cause, or completely unrelated.
Say you are pissed because you did not finish a job, but your job performance is increasingly better. Your emotion is not guiding you anywhere useful. It can be useful to understand dispassionately, and then choose to endorse it (that is, this seems a feeling that points to a correct direction, I will thing about solutions) or not (that is, this seems a feeling that does not point to where I want to go, thank you for your message, but I would rather not act on it).
Sometimes feelings are mistakes, like a optical illusion. Sometimes they are not.
Rumination is unhealthy. And believe it or not, one of the antidotes to it is being able to communicate ones feelings effectively. In my experience, more expressive people tend not to suffer ruminating thoughts.
I grew up west coast, spent a lot of time with people who I could "share my problems" with. It taught me to be pathetic when I'm down, to really reach for it. I don't like who I was when that was an effective means of attention.
I really wish the response would have been "You're having a hard time coping with the harshness of reality and acting immature, do your best to get it together soon."
Try as I might, I have no idea what this has to do with feelings. Are you making an assumption that people who acknowledge or express their feelings are not handling problems?
And of course, as others have pointed out, stoicism doesn't suggest not pondering over feelings.
This may be colored by my experience of mental illness, but generally I've learned/grown more from pondering and sorting out feelings in the past rather than right now. It's easy to fall into a trap of "worshipping your pain" (or your hypomanic euphoria for that matter).
OTOH I'm very appreciative of the dispassionate attitude encouraged by stoicism and meditation, etc. -- but that kind of wisdom is acquired with work, like building muscle. "You should lift heavy things!" is both an interesting aspirational model and dangerous advice if it isn't culturally obvious that you can get hurt lifting heavy things while not in shape.
(Edit: stoicism/meditation etc. are more or less like "second-order repression": as you acknowledge your fingertips or your breath, you acknowledge that you have feelings in order to theoretically understand them (locus of control/illusion of self). The danger is that letting go of first-order repression, you can let yourself have feelings about your feelings -- feeling good about feeling miserable would be the common type.)
I like to think of my self as happy Sisyphus enjoying pushing the rock up the hill. Thinking about the futility of the effort is by definition futile.
It's not a gift compared to what? Nonexistence?
"Handling your own problems" a lot of the time means "making other people responsible for my emotional well being."
I do love stoicism though and I think meditation and stoicism are excellent paths to understanding yourself and managing your internal state.
I'm seeing a lot of agreement in this thread, though. Healthy, deep relationships with family and close friends are important to keep you grounded, and therapy can help everyone. Many seemingly desirable positions of status that men and women strive for involve incredible amounts of stress, and people naturally have differing levels of stress tolerance, so at some point self-knowledge becomes very valuable. Having good people around you is a great way to build that self-knowledge.
Some people really seem to want men to be very emotional and assume something is wrong if they don't appear to be showing strong emotions. Often, they're just fine, and there's no there there.
If you keep picking at them, you'll probably generate some emotions, however.
I'd compare it to a tooth abscess. It's not like it's so painful you need to scream. It's just kind of there, occasionally causing problems. But if it goes untreated long enough, the bacteria in it can kill you. There are some parallels there with loneliness, which a lot of men suffer from.
So I'd say this is more the realization that "Oh, this pain is because of this source. I'm gonna go deal with that source." The process of dealing might involve making your emotions known (such as when breaking up).
Of course, if you're legitimately not in any kind of pain, then great. But most people are, in one form or another.
This is new to me. Making other people responsible for my emotional well-being is being dependent on other people for our own happiness. Stoicism does not suggest that you do this, on the contrary.
For me, men who need to share their feelings are weak. This is what women do. But we can't all be women. Men need to learn to enjoy their advantages: superior strength, speed, and resilience, but accept that problems won't just go away if you cry about them. Either solve the problem or accept it and don't give it another precious moment's thought.
It's not primarily that a comment like that is so bad in its own right. It's that it tends to produce worse from others and, compounded over time, that destroys the community.